Chemotherapy

Further to a list of side effects ranging from mildly unpleasant to just plain awful, the scattergun nature of chemotherapy often sees healthy tissue damaged along with the cancerous cells. Attacking these cancer cells with better precision would lead to more effective treatments and reduce harmful side effects, and has been a primary objective for researchers. Among this group is a team of scientists that has developed a way of administering cancer-fighting chemicals using an electric field that is claimed to enable a highly-targeted form of treatment. Read More

Scientists from Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine have discovered a potential treatment that may steer cancer cells toward their own destruction. The study focused on a particular gene that was found to influence levels of a tumor-fighting protein called 53BP1, the heightened presence of which makes cancer cells more vulnerable to existing forms of treatment. Read More

In cancer treatments such as chemotherapy, hundreds of thousands of cancerous cells are killed off. But if even one of these cells has a unique mutation, it can survive the treatment and start to multiply, giving rise to a set of more drug-resistant cells. Researchers at the Salk Institute in California have now gained new insights into what exactly is causing these variations in the cells, suggesting there may in fact be a way of switching off the mechanism and improving treatment effectiveness. Read More

Many of us drink green tea for its wonderful health benefits, including proven antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-aging and anti-cancer properties. Now, researchers in Singapore have taken its cancer-fighting properties to the next level, developing a green tea-based nanocarrier that encapsulates cancer-killing drugs. It is the first time green tea has been used to deliver drugs to cancer cells, with promising results. Animal studies show far more effective tumor reduction than use of the drug alone while significantly reducing the accumulation of drugs in other organs. Read More

Nanoparticles hold great potential as a way of both detecting cancer cells and delivering the drugs to treat them. One hurdle that has proven difficult to overcome is incorporating these properties into one multi-purpose device, as nanoparticles are generally engineered with either goal in mind. In what appears a promising development, researchers at the University of California Davis (UC Davis) Cancer Center have created a multi-tasking nanoparticle shown to be effective both in the diagnosis of a tumor and attacking its cells – a flexibility that could lead to new treatment options for cancer patients. Read More

Delivering drugs that can knock out tumor cells within the body, without causing adverse side effects, is a tricky busines. It's why scientists have taken to engineering new and creative types of nanoparticles that do the job. Increasing a nanoparticle's ability to carry more drugs expands treatment options, but creating nanoparticles capable of delivering more than one or two drugs has proven difficult – until now. Scientists at MIT report creating a revolutionary building block technique that's enabled them to load a nanoparticle with three drugs.
The approach, they say, could be expanded to allow a nanoparticle to carry hundreds more. Read More

In recent years, we've seen various research efforts looking to specifically target cancer cells as a replacement for the shotgun approach employed by chemotherapy that also damages healthy cells. The trick is to develop a delivery vehicle that identifies and targets only cancer cells, while ignoring the healthy ones. Researchers have found charged polymers have this ability, opening the door for nanoparticles containing cancer-fighting drugs to deliver their payload directly to the cancer cells. Read More

If a locked door must be opened, explosives can be used, but normally it is better to use a key. The conventional treatments for cancer, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, have a range of terrible side effects that resemble the use of explosives in search of health. Now a key has been found to treat various forms of leukemia and lymphoma with only very minor side effects. The drug ibrutinib has proven sufficiently safe and effective in early clinical tests by physicians at Ohio State University that it has been given breakthrough drug status by the FDA. Read More

According to American Cancer Society estimates, lung cancer will account for 27 percent of all US cancer deaths in 2013, making it by far the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women. Part of the problem is getting the toxic chemotherapeutic drugs used to treat the cancer into the lungs. A new drug delivery system aims to overcome this problem by allowing the drugs to be inhaled, thereby delivering the drug where it is needed while reducing the harmful effects to other organs. Read More

U.S. scientists are developing a technique that will target and kill cancer cells while simultaneously treating others in the same sample. Centered on fine-tuning the use of cancer destroying nanobubbles, the research holds promise for treating cancer patients in a way that’s far more targeted than chemotherapy. Read More